Posted
by
BeauHDon Friday November 25, 2016 @11:30PM
from the out-with-the-old-in-with-the-new dept.

At least 6 major countries, including Canada, France, Germany, the Netherlands, Austria and Finland, have all recently -- several within the past few weeks -- announced the imminent phase-out of all coal-fired power plants. Electrek reports: Earlier this week, Canada, which has already significantly reduced its use of coal to about 7% of its energy generation, announced a phase of the resource by 2030. The country's strong hydropower should keep dominating its energy generation, but the country has also been investing in wind and solar to make up the difference. A week before Canada's announcement, France announced a more aggressive timeline of 2023 for its own phase-out of coal, but it should be more easily achievable since they have already reduced the use of coal to 3% of their electricity generation -- thanks to a strong local nuclear industry. Finland is the latest country to join the group, but it also announced a more aggressive solution of simply banning entirely the use of coal to produce energy by 2030. The country gets about 12% of its electricity from coal, which it has to import. Peter Lund, a researcher at Aalto University and chair of the energy program at the European Academies' Science Advisory Council, told New Scientist: "These moves are important forerunners to enforce the recent positive signals in coal use. The more countries join the coal phase-out club, the better for the climate as this would force the others to follow." As for the U.S., it gets about 33% of its total electricity generation from coal and will likely grow the coal industry rather than phase it out under President-elect Donald Trump.

quote: "As for the U.S., it gets about 33% of its total electricity generation from coal and will likely grow the coal industry rather than phase it out under President-elect Donald Trump."

I don't believe it.

The coal business is dying from natural causes in the USA, and I don't think there's anything Trump can possibly do to turn that around. Thanks to the fracking revolution, cheap natural gas is rapidly undercutting and replacing coal, and some existing coal plants are even being converted to gas. Wind turbines have been going up in large numbers -- including here in Texas, where the wholesale price of electricity (dynamically auctioned via computer) has sometimes been pushed to zero. At the same time, the cost of solar panels has plummeted. How is coal going to compete with all that? It just can't.

The coal business is dying from natural causes in the USA, and I don't think there's anything Trump can possibly do to turn that around.

Part of the reason coal is dying is because of clean air regulations. Trump and the GOP could kill those. In addition, power companies have asked for subsidies to keep their coal plants open. No takers, today, but Trump might hand them some cash to "create jobs" or similar farce.

Wind turbines have been going up in large numbers -- including here in Texas, where the whole

quote: "As for the U.S., it gets about 33% of its total electricity generation from coal and will likely grow the coal industry rather than phase it out under President-elect Donald Trump."

I don't believe it.

The coal business is dying from natural causes in the USA, and I don't think there's anything Trump can possibly do to turn that around...

There's plenty he could do. Look at corn based ethanol as an example. It's not cost effective. It's barely energy positive (if at all). Yet thanks to the mighty corn lobby, that's where our ethanol comes from even though there are plenty of better sources.

With a big enough lobby with deep enough pockets just about anything is possible.

Yes, but some idiot that does not understand Economics NOR America, wrote the above BS. Hell, he even got our numbers wrong. Coal is now around 27% of our electricity and for 2017, it should be around 20-24%. Of course, from that point on, it will SLOWLY be shut down. All of the shutdown until end of 2016 has been due to nat gas prices combined with the requirement that all plants have ZERO mercury emissions. Many plants simply shut down and went to either nat gas or wind.
Starting in 2017, it wil be pure

Yeah, those coal minors in West Virginia that lost their jobs, the jobs Trump keeps promising to bring back. They obviously don't stand the real problem: coal mining isn't down because of environmental activism, it's down because of lack of demand. Fact is, natural gas power production is both cheaper and much more damaging to the environment.

In addition, only idiots will think that trump can bring back coal (yes, he promised, but again, only idiots believe that). WHy is this so? Because coal is TOO EXPENSIVE compared to nat gas and wind. IN addition, with the new nukes that will be on-line and tested in the next 4 years, these will replace MORE of our coal plants.

The real question is less about Western nations, and more about CHina.
China currently gets either 75 or 88% of their electricity from fossil fuel (depends on which chinese gov group gives you information).
They currently have around 1.2TW of coal capabilities, and are building out 35-50 GW of new coal plants EACH YEAR. Even this year, they will do 35 GW.
Around the year, 2030. they will have 1.9-2 TW of coal plant capabilities and only then will they quit building new coal plants.
Even if the ENTIRE west, including Japan and South Korea, shuts down 100% of our coal plants, that is actually less than 1TW. So, China will build out ~3/4 of what the west has. Unless that stops, nothing we do will matter.
The far left has to quit ignoring science and numbers and start hammering on CHina FOR REAL. In addition, so does the entire western gov.

I should have been more clear, but what I really meant was we aren't shutting down any coal power plants for a while...

No new coal plants are being built in America. None are being planned, and none are under construction. As existing plants reach the end of their economically useful life, they will be shutdown and replaced with new gas plants. This is all driven by economics, not ideology, and Trump can do little to slow things down, even if he wanted to, and it is unclear if he does. He will have limited funding and limited political capital. Squandering his resources and influence on "saving coal" is about the dumbe

Well, according to Wikipedia there are 195 countries and the six listed are:

17. Germany21. France38. Canada65. Netherlands95. Austria114. Finland

On the one hand, you can count that five out of six are in the upper half and not small island states that don't really do coal anyway. I mean it could be Bahamas, Barbados, Vanuatu, Samoa, Grenada and Tonga which would be considerably less impressive. On the other hand the top ten are about 4.3 billion people so even if the other 185 countries agreed the majority would still use coal. It's definitively still in the "we'll put our money where or mouth is" phase where they try to be practical, large scale examples that it's possible rather than really make a dent in world consumption.

But that's basically the EU led by Germany and France, realistically nobody believes China and India or the other developing nations will stop modernizing to keep emissions down. Population will also rise to 10 billion from an aging population despite the explosive growth is over. So the EU is trying to find a greener way to deliver a high quality way of life, hoping the rest of the world will be more EU-like than US-like. CO2 emissions in US: 16.4, EU: 8.6, World: 4.9, so if the world follows the US example emissions will triple...

realistically nobody believes China and India or the other developing nations will stop modernizing to keep emissions down.

China is working hard to shift away from coal too. See http://arstechnica.com/science... [arstechnica.com]. In particular where it says, "Accounting for the fact that 2016 was a leap year with an extra day, they estimate that China’s emissions will drop by about 0.5 percent (largely due to coal use declining nearly two percent)."

They have huge pollution problems, and they know that shifting to cleaner energy sources is necessary to do anything about it. From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]: "In 2015 China became t

You know nuclear power does nothing to change the total amount of nuclear material on/in the Earth, right? It just tends to concentrate it all in one place. As long as that one place isn't my back yard, I'm fine with it. We just need to find a good place to store it where nobody is planning on living for the next million years...

This isn't really true for breeder reactors. Materials can undergo nuclear activation by capturing neutrons. The infamous nuclear boy scout managed a fair bit of this, once he learned to use water as a moderator for his neutron source. Nuclear activation is likely to be an issue for fusion reactors someday, as someone proved some time ago that you couldn't get enough energy out of aneutronic fusion.

Almost all of that is thorium, which does not bioaccumulate, and is nearly harmless in the quantities and concentrations produced in coal ash. There are plenty of very good reasons to oppose coal power, but "radiation" isn't one of them.

The rest of the world doesn't care what your Emperor Trump feels like declaring. We're getting rid of coal because we see an obvious benefit to do so. You don't even need to believe in global warming to see why this is a good thing. So go ahead and mine all the coal you want, but don't be surprised when there's no export market for any of it.

Under Trump coal use will not grow, it just will stop shrinking for a while until renewables get more cost effective.

If Trump isn't going to grow coal use, then how does he plan on getting those 40,000 unemployed coal miners back to their jobs mining coal? It was one of his most-used campaign promises. He even repeated the exact number of jobs he was going to get back over and over.

Those jobs aren't coming back. Even if the mines come back to full operation they are going to be automated as much as possible. The mine owners don't care about the workers. They were a convenient thing to be used in the election but neither Clinton nor Trump really care about the miners. The best thing they can do is find other work because coal mining as a way of life is over. Even if the environment could take the burning of the burning of the coal, which it can't, the robots are here to take over th

Wind and solar are viable, they just don't lessen the needed amount of fossil fuel capacity needed, because you still need alternate power production for those times when it's dark and the air is still. However, in conjunction with hydro power, wind makes a lot of sense -- which is why hear on the Columbia River, we're building out lots of wind turbines close to the Bonneville Power dam. Solar? Not such a good idea here, it rains all the time. Might be a good idea in Eastern Oregon.

"Wind and solar are viable, they just don't lessen the needed amount of fossil fuel capacity needed"

I call bullshit. We could put in HVDC transmission lines (Max distance around 3500km or 83% of the width of the contiguous United States) running from east to west and north to south. Those lines are each longer than a weather system is big, so you ship wind power from windy areas to calm areas that need power, and from sunny daylight areas to dark or cloudy areas that need power.

For the rest of the balancing needed, we could, for example, put in one gigantic hydrogen electrolysis and storage and fuel cell generator facility in the geographic center of the country. It would only be 30% round-trip efficient (energy out compared to energy in) however then you just need to install three times the wind and solar you would otherwise need, and Bob's your Uncle. If you don't want to do that, use a bunch of large compressed air storage facilities http://energystorage.org/advan... [energystorage.org] running at 70% round-trip energy efficient.

And if you still don't want to do very large storage for some reason, then tap into the enormous geothermal energy rersources under the US. Way more than enough energy for the country's needs there. No GHG emissions.

How about a combination of all these strategies. The technology is there. The price is becoming reasonable, and a small and not too punitive carbon tax would make it economical to build all this new infrastructure fast. We just need to get off our asses and do it.

Don't forget demand management. A lot of processes are not time-sensitive, and high-speed bidding markets are a very well established technology now. The price of electricity could vary minute-by-minute with supply.

The wind picks up, the price plummets, and all across the state air-conditioners kick in, cars start charing and pumps start filling tanks. When the wind dies down, the price shoots up, and those devices cease to operate - left to wait until the price falls, or the need for their services becomes

Solar? Not such a good idea here, it rains all the time. Might be a good idea in Eastern Oregon.

Oddly enough, solar pops up in some strange places, like Alaska. Obviously you don't get it in the winter, but it allows them to cut way down on the amount of diesel fuel they need. So they store that during the summer when it's easy to get, and survival during the winter is more assured.

Under Trump coal use will not grow, it just will stop shrinking for a while until renewables get more cost effective. Also coal mining will ramp up again to access cleaner coal, so even the U.S. will be continuing to reduce carbon emissions just as we have been for decades now (unlike many other countries).

Some thoughts.

How is this "stop shrinking for a while" happen? Are we going to force other countries to buy US coal? Force US industries to not use other energy sources? Punish the gas industry somehow by kicking them out of the picture?

The coal jobs that are gone, are gone. Unless we are deploying a communist or fascist (in the true sense) government that is. It will take a communist type planned economy to force them back, one which denies the industry the automation that played a huge part in decimat

There isn't much difference [ucsusa.org]. Note: "And despite the many innovative coal combustion technologies being developed, the only practical way to reduce carbon dioxide emissions from coal is to get more energy out of each pound of coal -- to increase the efficiency. But the efficiency of typical coal plants has peaked at about 33 percent, limited mostly by their steam turbines. What doesn't become electricity becomes waste heat."

You are missing the point. It is more efficient to burn some types of coal than others. I acknowledge that the plants are relatively inefficient. The "clean coal" argument is that if you are going to burn coal, burn anthracite rather than other types, such as lignite. Personally, if coal is going to be used as a fuel, I hope it is anthracite.

The 33% is a cap regardless of coal type. High pollution remains making coal as a whole inadequate for an expanding or even constant economy. China loses 6% to coal-ash caused air pollution and is focusing development elsewhere as result.

One of the down sides of global warming getting so much press is that people have started to conflate carbon dioxide with pollution. Releasing carbon dioxide into the atmosphere in large quantities is a bad idea, but it's far from the only thing that coal-fired plants pump out in large quantities. In particular, the effects of carbon dioxide are global, whereas most of the other pollutants have a more significant local effect.

No thanks. I'd rather we have public policy that favors low / no carbon energy sources. Believe it or not, we DO get to pick winners in that regard so long as we don't pick WHICH low/no carbon source and don't pick which company is going to do it. But we 100% can decide to incentivize environmentally friendlier options that have longer term viability than pulling it out of the ground. Especially when there exists an entrenched system actively resisting competition and resists the internalization of external costs.

Still not taken off the glasses with the reversing lenses yet, I see...

Oh, so you know all about what my beliefs are by...what?...a crystal ball? Tea leaves? WaPo/HuffPo and the MSM? Your gender-studies professor? Find a safe space and a comfort-dog, cupcake.

*I* don't want to have government involved in picking winners and losers in the private sector. That *is* fascism. Just because the US government and the useful-idiots try to put a smiley-face on it and call it by other names doesn't change what it is. Just like your post is a classic text-book example of projection. Alins

Of course this will also stop the winds from blowing, keep tides from rising or falling, and cause hot springs (and all other underground hot things) to cool to room temperature in a matter of minutes.

If we have another Toba-class event, we're going to be worrying about lots of other things in any case--such as digging ourselves out from under all that volcanic ash and a worldwide, decades-long drop in average temperature on the order of 15C.

Coal isn't [grist.org] the cheapest fuel and has multiple logistical challenges renewable generation avoids. Nuclear is profitably run by French state (85% ownership), and is increasing in Finland. Germany is increasingly involved in Energy trade due to its central position in Europe, so the eventually outcome may be 100% renewable which work for industry - Porsche has a solar-powered factory [porsche.com] in Berlin-Adlershof.

If I had to pay "who's the shill" here it would be you. No power system is entirely clean but coal is well recognized as having higher external costs than almost everything else, even if you exclude carbine dioxide (which you should not.) And its operational costs are nothing to write home about either. Inertia is the only thing keeping the industry going.

Also, JFYI #4 is particularly wrong given most geothermal plants are closed loop, #2 WRT to birds is a solvable problem that is being addressed already

Not really significant, because China's objective and energy policy is directed at multiple nuclear technologies from not included in those charts and is actively building reactors while researching continued advancements.

Notice the doubling in nuclear generation capacity, that is supplemental to the previous charts on non-nuclear renewal energy production. China is the dominant power now, not the USA. China is building more energy production than any other country, and is actively avoiding coal and fossil fuel sources due to pollution.

Sure it is, given the current and expanding brain-drain from the USA as skilled and productive scientists and engineers escape the doom of Trump's USA, it has been promoted from "America's Hat" to "America's Brain".